Used for various government functions after the abolition of the monarchy in the 1918 revolution, the palace was damaged during the Allied bombing in World War II, and was razed to the ground by the East German authorities in 1950.

[4][5] The palace replaced an earlier fort or castle guarding the crossing of the Spree at Cölln, a neighbouring town which merged with Berlin in 1710.

In 1443 Frederick II "Irontooth", Margrave and Prince Elector of Brandenburg, laid the foundations of Berlin's first fortification in a section of swampy wasteland north of Cölln.

The main role of the castle and its garrison in this period was to establish the authority of the margraves over the unruly citizens of Berlin, who were reluctant to give up their medieval privileges to a monarchy.

In 1454 Frederick II, after having returned via Rome from his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, made the castle chapel a parish church, richly endowing it with relics and altars.

In 1538, the Elector Joachim II demolished the castle and engaged the master builder Caspar Theiss to build a new and grander palace in the Italian Renaissance style.

Huge crowds gathered outside the palace to present an "address to the king" containing their demands for a constitution, liberal reform and German unification.

In conjunction with Germany's defeat in World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm II was forced to abdicate, both as German Emperor and as King of Prussia.

In November 1918, during the immediate vacuum of power following the abdication of the Kaiser, Spartacist leader Karl Liebknecht declared a German socialist republic from a balcony of the Stadtschloss.

It was an attempt to steer the German revolution towards a communist Germany and stood in contrast to the proclamation of a republic that Philipp Scheidemann of the Social Democratic Party had made a few hours earlier from a balcony of the Reichstag building.

On the latter occasion, when both the air defences and fire-fighting systems of Berlin had been destroyed, the building was struck by incendiaries, lost its roof, and was largely burnt out.

The building was used for a Soviet war movie ("the Battle of Berlin") in which the Stadtschloss served as a backdrop, with live artillery shells fired at it for the realistic cinematic impact.

A secret 1950 GDR Ministry of Construction report, only rediscovered in 2016, calculated that reconstruction of the damaged Palace could be achieved for 32 million East German marks.

[11] But in July 1950 Walter Ulbricht, the new General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, announced the demolition of the palace.

From 1973 to 1976, during the government of Erich Honecker, a large modernist building was built, the Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic), which occupied most of the site of the former Stadtschloss.

In November 2003, the German federal government decided to demolish the building and leave the area and the adjacent Marx-Engels Platz (renamed Schlossplatz) as parkland, pending a decision as to its future.

The demolition was lengthy because of the presence of additional asbestos, and because the palace acted as a counterbalance to the Berliner Dom, across the street, on the unstable grounds of the Museum Island.

[14] East Germans resented the demolition, especially those for whom the Palace of the Republic had been a place of fond memories, or who felt a sense of dislocation in a post-Communist world.

Parts of cellars that had been situated in the south-west corner of the former Palace were discovered and it was decided these would be preserved and made accessible to visitors as an "archaeological window".

Opponents of the project included those who advocated the retention of the Palast der Republik on the grounds that it was itself of historical significance; those who argued that the area should become a public park; and those who believed that a new building would be a pastiche of former architectural styles, would be an unwelcome symbol of Germany's imperial past, and would be unacceptably expensive for no definite economic benefit.

[18][19] In 1992, he and Kathleen King von Alvensleben[20] founded, what evolved to be the Berlin City Palace Sponsoring Association – which became the most influential lobby group.

In 1993, on the world's largest scaffolding assembly, it audaciously erected a trompe-l'œil mockup of two frontages of the Stadtschloss façade on a 1:1 scale on plastic sheeting.

[23] In view of the previous opposition, including high cost, and most importantly, the psychological and political objections, successive German governments had declined to commit themselves to the project.

[24] Some of the internal spaces in Stella's design follow the exact proportions of the original state rooms of the palace; this would allow for their reconstruction at a later date should this be desired.

The foundation stone was finally laid by President Joachim Gauck in a ceremony on 12 June 2013 which heralded the launch of a €590 million reconstruction project.